Wilton company etches tiny niche

If semiconductor makers are going to take a bath this year, ASML”™s new immersion technology may keep its Wilton work force relatively high and dry.

ASML Holding NV manufactures lithography systems used to imprint circuitry on semiconductor chips and other devices. The company”™s two clean-room manufacturing facilities are in Wilton and Veldhoven in the Netherlands, where it is based. ASML closed the year with 6,580 employees, 1,000 more than a year ago. At last report, the company had 650 employees at its Wilton plant.

Despite selling six fewer systems than in 2006, ASML increased sales 6 percent to $5.7 billion, and it cracked $1 billion in earnings for the first time in its history. U.S. sales, however, fell 7 percent to $1.3 billion.

The company shipped 260 systems for the year, 25 of them used. It marked the start of volume shipments of immersion lithography systems, which allow semiconductor makers to shrink the size of circuits and so allow for smaller, more powerful chips ”“ such as camera or music player cards with up to 16 gigabytes of memory.

Whereas ASML reported an average selling price of $19 million per machine sold in 2007, the new immersion systems average $44 million each.

The immersion process is simple ”“ ASML”™s new machines dunk semiconductor wafers in water, which concentrates the beams of light emitted from the machines to etch thinner circuit lines.

In the third quarter, ASML shipped what it says is the world”™s first immersion lithography machine capable of imaging chip features down to 40 nanometers. The company also took four orders for delivery in 2009 of a new machine that can produce circuits 32 nanometers thick ”“ 32-billionths of a meter.

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is the only other technology that can produce lines that thin. With the Belgian chip research organization IMEC, ASML reportedly has produced two EUV machines ”“ one is being used by Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp. ”“ but IMEC last week indicated it expects immersion technology to be the dominant method.